Mr. Speaker, today I am grateful to honor the life of Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz and offer my sympathy to his family. I along with Congresswoman Lois Frankel, co-led H.R. 6015, the Benjamin Berell…
Mr. Speaker, today I am grateful to honor the life of Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz and offer my sympathy to his family. I along with Congresswoman Lois Frankel, co-led H.R. 6015, the Benjamin Berell Ferencz Congressional Gold Medal Act, which provided for the award of a Congressional Gold Medal to Mr. Ferencz in recognition of his service to the United States and the international community during the post-World War II Nuremberg trails and his lifelong advocacy for international criminal justice and the rule of law. The bill unanimously passed the House on May 10, 2022, and was signed into law in December. I am grateful for Mr. Ferencz's outstanding service and dedication to achieving international justice. I include in the Record the following obituary for Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz:
In 2011, at the age of 92, the diminutive but indomitable
Benjamin Ferencz rose to deliver the closing prosecution
speech at the first trial ever heard before the international
criminal court (ICC) in The Hague. Wearing black robes and a
starched white neck band, the veteran lawyer, who had
prosecuted Nazi mass murderers at the Nuremberg war crimes
trials more than 60 years earlier, saluted a ``historic
moment in the evolution of international criminal law''.
Granting Ferencz, who has died aged 103, the honour of
appearing on the prosecution team--in the trial of a
Congolese warlord--acknowledged the extraordinary role he had
played in advancing the cause of international justice. The
last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, he had dedicated his
life to campaigning, successfully, for the establishment of a
permanent court--the ICC--to try the world's most serious
crimes and for laws establishing the crime of aggression.
Guided by his motto, ``Law, Not War'', Ferencz was still
giving television interviews last year--arguing that those
responsible for atrocities in Ukraine must be brought to
trial.
His reputation rested on two criminal trials he conducted
at the age of 27 before US military courts sitting at
Nuremberg in 1947 after the second world war. At the time, he
had no previous experience leading courtroom prosecutions.
His first case was against SS officers who organized the
Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads operating in Nazi-occupied
eastern Europe. An estimated two million people were shot or
beaten to death and their bodies dumped in pits; the majority
of the victims were Jewish.
The documentary evidence Ferencz assembled was so
persuasive that he did not need to rely on witnesses. Opening
his argument, Ferencz declared: ``Vengeance is not our goal .
. . we ask this court to affirm by international penal action
man's right to live in peace and dignity.'' It was later
dubbed the biggest murder trial in history.
Twenty-two of the 24 Einsatzgruppen defendants were found
guilty of crimes against humanity. Fourteen were sentenced to
death and four eventually hanged. Ferencz had not requested
the death penalty.
His second Nuremberg trial, in which he appeared as special
counsel, involved the Krupp armaments group, whose directors
were accused of crimes against humanity and exploitation of
100,000 slave labourers. Eleven directors were found guilty
and served prison terms of between three and 12 years.
Ferencz was born in a Transylvanian village, Somcuta Mare,
which was then in Hungary and later became part of Romania.
Shortly afterwards his parents, Sarah (nee Schwartz) and
Joseph Ferencz, fled with their two children to the US to
escape antisemitism.
Benjamin was raised in the Hell's Kitchen district of New
York, an area then renowned for poverty and crime. He won a
scholarship to Harvard law school, where he researched war
crimes. In 1943, he enlisted as a soldier and fought his way
from the Normandy beaches to the Battle of the Bulge. His
legal experience resulted in his being called into General
George Patton's headquarters, where he was reassigned as a
war crimes investigator. In Buchenwald and other
concentration camps, he saw piles of corpses and emaciated
survivors. His first target, he later recalled, was to seize
the death records and correspondence that provided the
evidence used at Nuremberg. He was discharged after the war
and returned to New York to practice law and marry Gertrude
Fried. In 1946, however, he was recruited to join the
American war crimes unit at the Nuremberg trials.
The couple spent the next decade in Germany, where four
children were born and Ferencz worked alongside General
Telford Taylor, lead prosecutor at the U.S. military
tribunals. When the trials finished in 1949, Ferencz
coordinated reparations claims for Jewish survivors' groups.
In 1956, he returned to New York and opened a law firm with
Taylor, but later turned his attention to campaigning for a
permanent international criminal court. He wrote legal and
popular books, the last of which, Make It Count, an
autobiography, was published earlier this year. One of
Ferencz 's greatest regrets was that the US consistently
refused to ratify the ICC agreement and, in his words,
repeatedly ``tried to kill the idea''.
International recognition of Ferencz's contribution came
towards the end of his life. In his 90s, a path alongside the
international court of justice in The Hague was named after
him and a bench set up with the motto Law, Not War.
Ferencz identified the problem that international criminal
law is a patchwork where offenders who commit atrocities
often escape justice because many states have still not
ratified international court statutes. His response was
``Never give up!''
``He was inspiring precisely because in the face of all the
horror, he somehow managed to be optimistic,'' Philippe
Sands, professor of international law at University College,
London, said.
Sir Geoffrey Nice, a war crimes prosecutor at the
international criminal court for the former Yugoslavia, who
also cooperated with Ferencz, paid tribute to the way in
which he ``turned the traumas he experienced . . . into an
enduring determination to learn and teach from them''.
Gertrude died in 2019. He is survived by his son, Don, who
continued his father's work developing international
jurisdiction for the crime of aggression, three daughters,
Nina, Robin and Keri, and three grandchildren.
Benjamin Berell Ferencz, war crimes prosecutor, born 11
March 1920; died 7 April 2023.
